Imagine if Steam and EGS were hotdog vendors.
Steam offers all the condiments; mustard, ketchup, mayo, relish, onions, pickles, tomatoes, bacon, cheese, chili, etc.
EGS is just a plain hotdog. No condiments. You’re lucky to even get a bun.
Both are equal price.
Which hotdog are you getting?
Now imagine that the plain hotdog guy keeps whining that nobody wants his hotdogs.
The hotdog vendor keeps going on about how he’s the good guy because he pays more to the sausage suppliers. As if that’s at all relevant to his customers.
He also tried suing the fruit vendor because they wouldn’t let them sell their hotdogs on their Apple cart.
I’m having a really hard time keeping up with the analogies at this point, haha
To be fair, with regular groceries, it’s not uncommon for consumers to be concerned about whether or not the person who manufactured or processed the good or food you are buying was paid a fair wage. So in that sense, it is kind of relevant to the hotdog vendors customers.
I’m only playing devils advocate though. Fuck epic lol
That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.
Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.
Epic games store occasionally gives you a free hotdog every week. But it also contains no fixings, and you gotta eat it at the counter.
I eat that free hotdog every week, then go across the street and buy another one.
I eat that free hotdog every week, then go across the street and buy another one.
You actually eat it? I put it in the fridge for bad times but only eat the ones from the other side.
I don’t know so much about EGS, but probably some of the following (most of which I don’t use very often, I hope I recall correctly)
- Refunds
- Family sharing of games
- Sharing games for other local users
- Being able to lend games
- Remote Play (with friends)
- Remote Play (stream for a local machine)
- Linux support through proton
- probably more?
- Workshop, providing mod hosting/browser/framework for API
- controller configuration tools
- Better storefront with decent discovery and better search (Although this wouldn’t be a condiment in the anology)
- Passable social tools (IE voice chat)
- Game streaming to friends
- Cloud saves
- Relatively good review system
- Item marketplace and trading
yesssssssss, but the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand, and the second responds by attempting to throw piss water-balloons at any passers by, or something
Nope, you are wrong, this is a common mistake that Epic keeps spreading as missinformation. Valve does NOT enforce price parity on other platforms, there are games that are sold cheaper on other stores, this is up to the publisher to decide, but most publishers find it easier to have the same price across the board. If this was true games that are exclusive on Epic would be cheaper until they come to Steam years later, but they aren’t.
The mistake happens because there is one specific case in which Valve enforces price parity, but for this you need to know three things:
- Valve gives away for free infinite steam keys to publishers
- Those keys can be sold by the publisher elsewhere
- If they do that the publisher keeps 100% of the revenue of that sale
That sale of that free steam key for which Valve is not charging anything is regulated and can’t be sold cheaper than Steam on regular basis, it can be in a sale for cheaper, but the regular price must match Steam and if it goes on sale outside of Steam eventually it needs to do a similar sale on Steam (but not necessarily at the same time).
So one thing that’s amazing that Valve does for people who publish their games with them is getting them hate because of Epic, please stop spreading missinformation.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand
It’s more accurate to say that the plain hotdog vendor wants to sell the other vendor’s hotdogs at a lower price at his own stand, thereby undercutting the sales of the first vendor for their own hotdogs.
not really, unless you’re implying the fancy hotdog vendor paid for the development of said hotdogs, which they didn’t
games don’t belong to valve
